The PBCS Movie Standings: The Ultimate Movie Success Story

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We're new at this whole box office nerdymetrics thing, but I suspect it will be a very long time before we see a similar PBCS score to what "Paranormal Activity 3" pulled off this week. When you've got a movie that was made for virtually no money and pulls in twice as much money as what "Real Steel" got in its opening weekend, you've got yourself a smashing success. Your box office figures look like this, according to Box Office Mojo:

1. Paranormal Activity 3 - $54.0M

2. Real Steel - $11.3M

3. Footloose - $10.6M

4. The Three Musketeers - $8.8M

5. The Ideas of March - $4.9M

6. Dolphin Tale - $4.2M

7. Moneyball - $4.1M

8. Johnny English Reborn - $3.8M

9. The Thing - $3.1M

10. 50/50 - $2.8M

Pretty huge number for PA3's opening weekend, but it gets even more impressive when you factor in the budget, the reviews, and the per-screen averages. Behold your PBCS rankings:

1. Paranormal Activity 3 - 7,374

2. Martha Marcy May Marlene - 223

3. The Ideas of March - 149

4. Courageous - 139

5. Margin Call - 134

6. 50/50 - 131

7. Footloose - 118

8. Moneyball - 61

9. Dolphin Tale - 57

10. Real Steel - 34

Holy macaroni, LOOGIT THAT SCORE! PA3 HAS GONE TO PLAID! That's what happens when you make ten times your original production budget in a single weekend. PA3 is proof that, even with a small budget, you can make a killing in the horror genre this time of year. I'm eagerly awaiting the merging of the PA and "Saw" franchises. It will be called "Paranormal Saw" and it'll make $500 billion.

You'll notice two other movies in our top five that were nowhere near the top of the box office: "Margin Call" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene," both of which were in limited release and drew rave reviews and large per-screen averages to help boost their score. Those will likely fall off in the coming weeks. At least I hope so, because typing out "Martha Marcy May Marlene" is quite arduous. I wish they had called it "The Four Ms" and been done with it.